A project for creating a digital product involves many participants each making small contributions of digital assets, and working together in collaboration to create the finished product. For instance, behind the creation of an animated movie, teams of individuals work for many months on scenes that are later joined together in the finished product. Because the work involves large amounts of computing resources, these teams typically are supported by a central server that processes and stores digital assets associated with the project. This involves establishing a large information technology infrastructure along with a team for maintaining the infrastructure.
While the server centric model works well on high speed networks such as Local Area Networks within a localized area, it breaks down when project team spans across the globe and the data latency becomes too large. For instance, the server centric model is best configured to support teams that are located within the same building or on the same campus. Importantly, minimal latency is introduced in the processing, storing and transferring of information such that collaboration between partners is at or near real-time.
However, many projects involve team members that are located throughout the world. Serving team members on both sides of the globe from a central server introduces increased latency, especially when involving the transfer of information between parties located in different regions. Part of the reason is that the central server has to process data, and then ship that data a longer distance through more switches and routers to support team members located half way around the globe. This latency contributes to a communication disjoint between project members located in different regions, and for team members located far from the central server that are waiting for data. Normally, an artist would have very quick access to files and would expect quick responses from his or her content creation tools accessing the files. An artist waiting for a file or related information to be processed from the central server can quickly lose his or her creative energy and drive.
As such, one viable solution is to create duplicate servers on both sides of the globe. That is, information between the two servers is continually synchronized in an effort to provide server centric models that are localized to particular regions. This new model greatly reduces the problem of latency when involving the processing, storing, and the transfer of information for remote team members. However, with the added servers, additional infrastructure is necessary, along with additional maintenance staff to establish and maintain the new infrastructure. This in turn, requires additional cost in equipment and staffing. As this cycle repeats to support team members in new regions, more and more infrastructure and staffing to maintain that infrastructure is required, thereby further driving the cost up for the creation of a digital product.
The cost of establishing and maintaining a server centric information technology infrastructure is prohibitive to smaller teams distributed throughout the world and more importantly, artistic teams generally do not have the technology expertise to set up and maintain such systems.